21 December 2005

"A Charlie Brown Christmas," SNL Mashup

“Suppose you found a thousand dollars in cash that you knew had been lost by a billionaire. Now, because this is a hypothetical question, let’s assume that the billionaire would never be aware that he lost it, and there would be no way that anyone else would know if you kept the money. And let’s say you knew there would be no reward or other indirect benefit in returning the money. Would you give it back?”

[...]

In my experience, most of the people who say they’d give back the cash are the ones who don’t need an extra thousand dollars. The ones who say they’d keep it usually have a good idea how they’d spend it.

A certain percentage of the population believes that God is watching them with one hand on a lightning bolt and the other on the trap door to Hell. About half of that group will also keep the money, under the theory that if God wanted the billionaire to have it, he never would have let him lose it in the first place.